@Cass_m Put another way, it’s rare for someone to be like, “That person is hideous and repulsive, totally unappealing—which is exactly why I’m sleeping with them”.

@atomicpoet as for how this differs from regualar sexual experience, just look at the links, especially the grey one.
It's a labe I know well, in fact it's one I've used for myself in the past (that display name did not come from nowhere)
The grey exists in the space where nothing makes sense and more common terms start to seem imprecise.
Lost in the fog, with cause and effect unclear, one scrambles for understanding (is this a symptom of gender dysphoria? A
side-effect of depression? Am I merely overthinking things?) and finds... not much.
an emotion here, a stray thought there, effetively digging through the soil of your own psyche for... something.
Ultimately, one concludes that while this place sure resembles some other places you think you've heard about, this is certainly not those places, and you are now in a new, rather grey-coloured place.
Which you and others like you then proceed to name graysville.
Now, given that you've now all decided you live in greysville (we never quite could agree an the name), you need to figure out what else is in/around the place.
Things like soil, or trees, or deer, things people in other places would take for granted because they come with the territory.
Basically, they're approaching the whole thing from an abnormal perspective and thus getting unusual results, even when the thing being investigated may seem normal to others.
Or at least, this makes sense to me, based on what I remember from the time I thought it made sense to call myself greysexual-greyromantic.

@GothFvck I won’t lie. This is my immediate thought. I do think the need to categorize and label everything tends to flatten experience and leads to the illusion that everything is subservient to language. But I’m also willing to listen to people who feel otherwise. Not that they’re right—just that I’m willing to hear them out.